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Stance-Taking on Brexit in Small Stories on Facebook

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Stance-Taking on Brexit in Small Stories on Facebook ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 11, No. 9, pp. 998-1006, September 2021 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1109.04 Stance-taking on Brexit in Small Stories on Facebook Dmytro Poberezhnyi Department of English Philology, V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, Kharkiv, Ukraine Abstract—This paper looks at how the stance of English-speaking Facebook users towards Brexit is actualized in their comments to posts addressing this issue. By using a mixed research approach, which combines narratological analysis of small stories (Georgakopoulou, 2007) with stance-taking theory (Du Bois, 2007), this paper puts to scrutiny 187 small stories which appeared online in January-June 2021. In the focus of attention are verbal and non-verbal stance-taking devices which are analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. It is shown that both rational and affective stance of anglophone tellers of small stories about Brexit is mostly negative, which can be accounted for by fears and worries caused by the negative trends in home and foreign affairs in the United Kingdom in the post-Brexit period. Index Terms—Brexit, Facebook, post-Brexit, small story, stance (affective, rational), stance-taking I. INTRODUCTION This paper offers an analysis of stance-taking in small stories found in the English segment of Facebook in commentaries to posts in the post-Brexit period. In the information society, social networks play a crucial role in the life of people, providing vast opportunities for their personal and professional self-expression as well as their political self-identification. Facebook is a compelling example of that. Having over a billion registered users, it is the most popular social network in the world. As Georgalou aptly remarks (Georgalou, 2015, p. 1), Facebook performs the function of a "cardiograph" of society. This function is evident, inter alia, in how people recount their perceptions of major socio-political events, Brexit being one of them. The withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union is not a short-time happening, but a long-term process rooted historically in the complex relationship of the United Kingdom with mainland Europe. The growing tension in the relations of the United Kingdom with the European Union resulted in a referendum that took place on June 23, 2016, where the majority of voters expressed their desire for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. This event is the starting point of the Brexit timeline which ends on December 31, 2020 (https://www.cer.eu/brexit- timeline), marking the completion of the transition period and beginning of the post-Brexit one (Gymglish). “Post- Brexit” is a new term that has not been universally accepted so far but has already made its way into the present-day public sphere constituted around networks of communication. Digitalization of interpersonal communication, where two communicants (the addresser and the addressee) keep changing roles on a more or less equal basis, has resulted in the emergence of mass self-communication (Deuze, p. 6) – a network that connects many addressers and addresses both live (for example, in a video call) and online (for instance, commenting on someone’s post on Facebook). Thus, mass self-communication combines the features of interpersonal and mass communication. The rapid growth of this form of communication caused the appearance of new narrative forms, one of which is a small story. Georgakopoulou defines a small story as a non-prototypical variety of narrative activity, such as tellings of ongoing, future or hypothetical events, which may be known or unknown to the addressee, as well as allusions to tellings and refusals to tell (Georgakopoulou, 2007, p. 148). Small stories differ from the Labovian canonical stories: they typically occur in ordinary conversation and do not have the canonical narrative structure (the beginning, middle, and end) (Georgakopoulou, 2006; Georgakopoulou & Bamberg, 2005). Being outside the scope of traditional narratological inquiry, small stories are of interest not only to narratologists of functional orientation, but also to communication researchers, psychologists, sociologists, etc. Small stories about post-Brexit actualize the attitudes of Facebook users to the economic and political changes in the United Kingdom after its decision to leave the European Union entered into force on December 31, 2020. Unlike many traditional media (print and broadcast), Facebook has practically no restrictions for its users to express their stance: comments on Facebook are deleted only in case of extremely obscene language, while the group administration promotes different fields of vision. Stance is understood here after Du Bois (2007) as a linguistically articulated form of social action construed within the broader scope of language, interaction, and sociocultural value. This research belongs at the intersection of linguo-narratological and communication studies. Its object matter is small stories about Britain's withdrawal from the European Union, more specifically, about the post-Brexit phase of the process. The subject matter is linguistic and extralinguistic means of stance-taking in the small stories under consideration. © 2021 ACADEMY PUBLICATION THEORY AND PRACTICE IN LANGUAGE STUDIES 999 The aim of the analysis is to bring to light the stance-taking means used by tellers of small stories about post-Brexit. In order to achieve this aim, two objectives have been set forth: first, to identify epistemic and affective linguistic and extralinguistic stance-taking means used in small stories about post-Brexit; second, to determine the qualitative characteristics of stance-taking in small stories under analysis. The paper has a conventional structure. The introduction is followed by a theoretical section, where the notions of narrative, small story, and stance are considered. In the section to follow, the data and methods are described. The next part of the paper presents the main findings and discusses them. The conclusion offers some implications and outlines prospects for further research. II. THEORETICAL PREREQUISITES Here we consider two main approaches to narrative analysis, specifying the one that this research belongs to, then define the content of the term ‘small story’, after that, describe how the term ‘stance’ is treated in modern linguistics and characterize its affective and rational varieties. Within the structuralist approach (Labov & Waletzky, 1967), a narrative is defined as a text that portrays events, i.e., changes in some initial state of things. These changes can be external (natural events, social interactions) or internal (mental events). Structuralists take temporality to be the main feature of a narrative, which means that discourse, to be considered a narrative, should be based on some structural scheme that reflects a sequence of events. Narrative blocks (abstract, orientation, complicating actions, evaluation, resolution, and coda) are components of the canonical narrative structure. All kinds of ‘deficient’ narratives, i.e., the ones that do not have the canonical structure, remain out of the scope of structurally oriented narratological inquiry. The functionalist approach, which focuses on teleological aspects of discourse, on the contrary, considers that non- prototypical varieties of narratives, small stories in particular, do merit scholarly attention. Functional theorists postulate the interconnection of the two main functions of language: cognitive and communicative. They recognize that narratives are construed as a kind of interpretative phenomenon, which is a part of the human experience of the world (Fisher, 1987, p. 24; Crites, 1971; Carr, 1997). Consequently, they adhere to the prototypical view on the structure of a category, which presupposes drawing a distinction between the nucleus (the prototypical member) and periphery (marginal members). According to this approach, the prototypical member of the category of narrativity is the canonical story that has a complete set of structural components (abstract, orientation, complicating actions, evaluation, resolution, and coda), while the small story has the status of a peripheral member, which possesses only some of the components, for instance, complicating actions and coda. Research into small stories is different from the traditional line of inquiry into ‘grander’ narratives that provide a ‘panoramic’ view elicited from autobiographies, interviews, etc. The framework for analyzing small stories was suggested by Bamberg (1997) and further developed by his associates (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2005; Georgakopoulou, 2007, 2013, 2017; Georgalou, 2015). The scholars emphasized the role these stories play in identity construction and positioning (Georgakopolou, 2007, 2014; Sadler, 2018; Page, 2010). Phylogenetically, people’s brains are hardwired for narrative: since time immemorial, a good story has been the best vehicle to share one’s idea with another person. Appealing not only to reason, but also to emotions and the subconscious, a narrative connects the situation to numerous contexts (Morozova, 2019, p. 327). Facebook offers its users an opportunity for rich participation in commenting, allowing for narratives to be told by a large number of users in different contextually conditioned Facebook segments, which makes this social network a good source for studying the discourse subject’s stance-taking. It is in small stories told in the ongoing user performance on Facebook rather than in canonical
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